I Know You Think I've Forgotten
but today
in rain
without coat without hat
—2012
Originally published in The Beauty (Knopf, 2015); all rights reserved. Copyright © by Jane Hirshfield. Used by permission of the author, all rights reserved.
Let them not say: we did not see it.
We saw.
Let them not say: we did not hear it.
We heard.
Let them not say: they did not taste it.
We ate, we trembled.
We sit on our skeletons’ bones.
We hear with our skeletons’ bones.
We speak of beauty by moving our jaws and our teeth.
The original meaning of Paradise: a place,
a walled garden.
Our lives, our stories, this hour inside one.
A staircase from Piranesi. A hummingbird drinking.
The world asks, as it asks daily:
And what can you make, can you do, to change my deep-broken, fractured?
I count, this first day of another year, what remains.
I have a mountain, a kitchen, two hands.
Can admire with two eyes the mountain,
actual, recalcitrant, shuffling its pebbles, sheltering foxes and beetles.